As soon as the store realized that these two black guys were basketball players, they had five clerks waiting on them hand and foot. Nobody ever thinks that I’m a player too — that a white guy could be playing professional basketball. (…) It’s almost a reversed role for whites. If there are nine white guys and one black guy at a corporation, the black guy has to perform so people know he deserves to be there. In the N.B.A., if there are nine black guys and one white guy, the white guy has to prove it. Vinny Del Negro
Whoever you hang around with for most of your life, that’s who you become like. And I’ve been playing basketball for most of my life. Laettner
A lot of people look at us as tokens. They think there are one or two whites on the team because there has to be or there’d be an uproar. I feel white players don’t get the respect we deserve. There are only 300-something players in the N.B.A. That doesn’t leave room for tokens. (…) I’m exactly the kind of player that white players are stereotyped after. That’s my game. I’m a smart player. I think I’m athletic, but I’m not nearly as athletic as some of the guys who can play the game. I can dunk, but I don’t dunk like some of these guys do. There aren’t many white guys who can jump the way they can. (…) We don’t dislike the black music or the life style, we just have a different kind of life style. We get along great with everybody on the team, but we just don’t go out and do the things they do. Pete Chilcutt (Houston Rockets)
Just because you come from an upper-class white background and have everything doesn’t mean you aren’t willing to sacrifice. If I didn’t really bust my tail, none of these guys would respect me. Like Harold tells me all the time: ‘Hey, man, you’re taking a spot away from a guy who would kill to be here, a black guy.’ Geiger
Sure, the white guys are the free-throw shooters and the three-point shooters. The black guys, they’re the jumpers and dunkers, the better athletes. It’s a stereotype that’s unfortunate for both sides. I don’t think I’ve gotten credit as an athlete. And at the same time, there’s the perception that a Clyde Drexler or a Michael Jordan is so gifted that the game comes easy to him and that’s not true, either. Danny Ainge
When is the last time you saw an ‘N.B.A. Is Fantastic’ video with some white guy dunking on somebody? I was always perceived as the slow white guy even though I’ve never been that. It would have been interesting to see how it would have been if I had been black. They probably would have said, ‘Wow, you’re a smart player for a black guy.’ (…) Throughout my career, whenever there’s been public music in the locker room or from a boom box, it has always been black music. I remember coming into the league and it taking me a while, hanging out around a lot of black players, even to understand what they were saying. They’re talking fast, using slang and nicknames. There’s an awkward time when you’re trying to get accepted, learn what they’re about, let them know what you’re about. I’ve seen players whose careers have died because they don’t like blacks. They had no chance, nor should they have a chance. Not only were they frozen out, but vilified, to the point where even the white guys didn’t want to be around them. Danny Schayes
You have to be a realist. It’s true in most cases. White people can’t jump as high. That’s a fact. And it’s a fact that white people don’t have much rhythm. We are stiff. Scott Brooks (Dallas Mavericks)
This is only a black league from the players’ point of view. What you have in the N.B.A. is the same slice of broad America that you have in business — let’s say 15 percent, approximately, of coaches and front-office personnel are black. Now, since 15 percent of America is black, there’s nothing really wrong with that, right? Except that 15 percent of the players aren’t black — they’re white. Brian Williams (Nuggets)
A white player’s life in the National Basketball Association is a reverse-image experience all but unique in American culture. Although fewer than 13 percent of United States citizens are African-American, about 80 percent of the N.B.A.’s players are. Most of the stars are black, while the whites are usually the lesser-knowns, often the players at the end of the bench. There are exceptions, to be sure, including Utah’s John Stockton, Cleveland’s Mark Price and Minnesota’s Christian Laettner, but during the past two decades, most of the league’s best players — and biggest draws — have been black. Of the 357 players on N.B.A. rosters as of the beginning of March, 290 were African-Americans, including several of mixed descent. Despite the recent infusion into the league of European-born white players like Chicago’s Toni Kukoc and Seattle’s Detlef Schrempf, only 7 of the 27 N.B.A. teams this season had a white player ranking among its top three in minutes played. Every one of the league’s 20 leading scorers was black, and all but 2 of its 20 leading rebounders. Not one N.B.A. team has as many whites as blacks. (…) Offering an opinion on such racial incongruities often means asking for trouble, a lesson learned by Al Campanis, the former baseball executive; Jimmy (the Greek) Snyder, the former sports commentator, and the authors of « The Bell Curve. » But whatever its cause, the N.B.A.’s black-white ratio has had the intriguing effect of casting whites into minority roles. (..) Living and working as a white man in the N.B.A. is a racial experience that few other whites will ever encounter, and nearly all of them realize that. (…) Many black players believe that a team with few white players will make an extra effort to acquire one or more as reserves, if only to decorate the end of the bench. (…) Accurately or not, many blacks believe that unofficial white quotas do exist, but shrug them off as an unavoidable extension of the outside world. (…) The Spurs’ Del Negro sees what he calls « almost a reversed role » for whites. (…) Some whites use the whispers of tokenism as self-motivation. On the court, Geiger throws himself at loose balls, emitting screams and grunts, and generally acts like a man possessed, helping transcend a stereotype he often hears around the league: that whites, because they don’t need basketball success as much as many blacks do, aren’t willing to work as hard. (…) It’s a common N.B.A. scene: a team of black athletes coached by a white man. (The players, however, both black and white, are well remunerated: the average player salary last season was $1.6 million, while a head coach with a new contract might make just over $1 million.) At the beginning of this season, only 4 of the league’s 27 head coaches were black; by the end of the season, there were 7 black coaches — still a rather slim number considering that more than half of the league’s coaches are former N.B.A. players. (…) the league has been integrated since 1950, and integration could easily have happened earlier: blacks had been playing on predominantly white college teams since 1920. (…) By 1959, every N.B.A. franchise had signed at least one black player. A decade later, there were roughly equal numbers of black and white players. By the mid-1970’s, blacks had become a majority. According to Ashe, this growing imbalance created problems for the league. (..) In spite of the natural talent displayed by black players, many continued to feel black player presence and dominance of the sport was the root cause of declining audience attendance. » But attendance wasn’t declining everywhere. In 1979, the Boston Celtics signed Larry Bird, who would reign as the N.B.A.’s best white player until he retired in 1992; almost immediately, the team began selling out the Boston Garden. This was in sharp contrast to a previous Celtics era, when the dynamic black center Bill Russell had led the team to 11 championships but often failed to fill the Garden even for playoff games. During the 1980’s, fielding the whitest team in basketball, the Celtics won three championships and sold out every home game. Of the 46 players who wore Celtic uniforms during the decade, 22 were white, including Bird, Kevin McHale, Danny Ainge and Bill Walton. At one point, 10 of 14 Celtics, including those on the injured-reserve list, were white; that team, playing for a black coach, K. C. Jones, breezed to the 1986 N.B.A. title. The Celtics’ whiteness hardly went unnoticed. Many blacks around basketball, and around Boston, considered the Celtics to be a racist franchise that pandered to a largely racist community. (The Boston Red Sox had long endured similar criticism.) (…) Still, Dennis Rodman and Isiah Thomas, black players then with the Detroit Pistons, went so far as to claim that if Bird had been black, he would have been considered merely another talented player, not the N.B.A. legend and folk hero he had become. « The rest of the world is ignorant, and through ignorance comes stereotypes, » says McHale, recalling a Celtics team so relaxed about race that they held practice games of whites against blacks. « I was lucky enough to play with one of the best players who ever lived — Larry Bird. When Dennis Rodman said he’d be just an average player if he was black, I thought, ‘I guard him every day in practice; he’d kick your butt if he was black or any other color.’ That was just idiotic. » For all Bird’s athletic ability, even white fans seem to remember him more for his passing, his nearly flat-footed outside shots and his intelligent play. Similarly, Danny Ainge, now with the Phoenix Suns, rarely receives mention as one of the league’s most athletic players even though he played third base for the Toronto Blue Jays and has good jumping skills and extraordinary hand-eye coordination. (…) Still, about half the white players I interviewed had little objection to the racial stereotypes. « You have to be a realist, » says Scott Brooks, a white guard on the Dallas Mavericks. « It’s true in most cases. White people can’t jump as high. That’s a fact. And it’s a fact that white people don’t have much rhythm. We are stiff. » (…) I called the Rockets looking for a statistic that might illustrate Chilcutt’s style and I found one: as of the beginning of March, the 6-foot-11 forward had played 780 minutes of N.B.A. basketball this season and recorded a grand total of nine dunks. (…) At the moment, Chilcutt is the only active white player on the Houston roster. There are white coaches, a white trainer, a white media relations director and a white reporter on the bus, but no white peers. It is a situation, he says, that he has grown accustomed to and hardly notices anymore, though this year he spent much of his time on the road with two white teammates, Scott Brooks (who was recently traded) and Zan Tabak (who was on the injured list for several weeks). « We don’t dislike the black music or the life style, we just have a different kind of life style, » Chilcutt said. « We get along great with everybody on the team, but we just don’t go out and do the things they do. » From the court to the bus to the locker room, black culture sets the tone in the N.B.A. (…) Life inside the bubble of the N.B.A., several black players told me, is a refreshing reprieve from, as Doc Rivers puts it, White America. But the league is hardly perfect. While black coaches are rare, there are also few black front-office executives and not a single team has black majority ownership. (…) As the Rockets take the court, against the Mavericks, two white fans lean over the railing to speak to Olajuwon, the affable Nigerian-born center. Then Maxwell emerges from the tunnel. It is his first game since a 10-game suspension for hitting a fan and he’s greeted by boisterous shouts both for and against him. Drexler, on his way to the court, stops for a brief conversation with a fan in the second row. For most Rockets fans, black and white, these three players are the Rockets, along with Cassell, Smith and Robert Horry. Pete Chilcutt steps to the floor unnoticed. Like the majority of the N.B.A.’s white players, he’s part of the supporting cast. He’ll never be an Olajuwon or a Jordan, pulling fans from their homes on a winter night. He has worked his way to the pinnacle of his profession, but he goes largely unappreciated even by the white stockbrokers who invariably talk sports after an hour of clumsy 5-on-5 at the Y. Bruce Schoenfeld
A white man wants to win first, look good second. A black man wants to look good first, win second. Billy Hoyle
Ca fait bien longtemps qu’un Blanc aurait dû courir le 100 m en moins de 10′. Beaucoup s’en étaient approchés, déjà. Mais visiblement, ça ne les intéresse pas trop. (…) Dès que quelqu’un fait tomber une barrière, d’autres s’engouffrent dans la brèche. On peut donc penser qu’après Lemaitre, de nombreux blancs y parviendront. Asafa Powell
Il faut 10 ans d’entrainement intensif pour exceller en quoi que ce soit. Herbert Simon (prix Nobel d’économie 1978)
La recherche scientifique a établi qu’il faut huit à douze années ou 10 000 heures d’entrainement pour qu’un athlète talentueux puisse rejoindre l’élite. On appelle ça la règle des 10 ans ou des 10 000 heures. Pour les athlètes, les entraineurs et les parents, cela se traduit par un peu plus de 3 heures d’entrainement quotidiennes pendant 10 ans. Istvan Balyi
Studying violinists in Berlin he found that none who had practiced for fewer than 10,000 hours ever became virtuosi. By contrast, nearly all those who had practiced for more than 10,000 hours by the age of 20 went on to become principal violinists. Joerg Blech
Pourquoi les Blancs ne sautent pas
A l’heure où le banquier de la Bundesbank Thilo Sarrazin se voit contraint de démissionner pour avoir accusé les musulmans dans un livre de « vivre aux crochets de l’état allemand », de « ne pas vouloir s’intégrer » et même ‘d’affaiblir l’intelligence moyenne du pays » …
Et où les athlètes blancs ont mis plus de 40 ans à rattraper les noirs au 100 m …
Retour, avec le Spiegel, sur les raisons pour lesquelles, comme pour les violonistes ou les élèves immigrés défavorisés qui n’ont pas fait leur 10 000 heures d’entrainement intensif, les blancs ne sauront jamais sauter, du moins à un haut niveau …
How Hereditary Can Intelligence Be?
Studies Show Nurture at Least as Important as Nature
Joerg Blech
The Spiegel
09/06/2010
Researchers have long overestimated the role our genes play in determining intelligence. As it turns out, cognitive skills do not depend on ethnicity, and are far more malleable than once thought. Targeted encouragement can help children from socially challenged families make better use of their potential.
Eric Turkheimer jokes about people who believe environmental influences alone determine a person’s character: « They soon change their tune when they have a second child, » he says. A father himself, he is speaking from experience. His eldest daughter likes being the center of attention, while her sister is shy and more reticent at school.
Even so, Turkheimer doubts that genetics alone can provide the complete answer. As a clinical psychologist working at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, he repeatedly came across people whose childhoods hadn’t been as carefree as those of his daughters. Many of his patients are from impoverished backgrounds.
« I could see how poverty had literally suppressed these people’s intelligence, » 56-year-old Turkheimer says.
Scientists typically use twins to gauge the influence of our genes on the one hand and the environment on the other. However Turkheimer noticed that such studies rarely involve twins from broken homes. Stress, neglect and abuse can have a dramatic effect on intellectual ability. And it’s precisely this factor that many nature-vs.-nurture studies have completely failed to address.
Plugging a Gap
Turkheimer and his colleagues are the first scientists to have plugged this gap. Their three studies conducted in the United States on this issue have now compared the intelligence of hundreds of twins from more privileged backgrounds with those from more difficult environments. They found that the higher a child’s socioeconomic status, the greater the genetic influence on the difference in intelligence. The situation is very different for children from socially disadvantaged families, where differences in intelligence were hardly inherited at all.
« The IQ of the poorest twins appeared to be almost exclusively determined by their socioeconomic status, » Turkheimer says. A person’s intelligence can only truly blossom if the environment gives the brain what it desires.
Ulman Lindenberger, a 49-year-old psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Education Research in Berlin, has come to the same conclusion. He says, « The proportion of genetic factors in intelligence differences depends on whether a person’s environment enables him to fulfill his genetic potential. » In other words: Seeds that are scattered on infertile soil won’t ever grow into large plants.
This is precisely what intelligence researchers have denied up to now. Dazzled by their studies of carefree middle-class and upper middle-class twins, they decided that cognitive skills are largely under genetic control, that academic talent is biologically hard-wired and can unfurl in almost any environment.
‘Intelligence Is Highly Modifiable by the Environment’
In the meantime psychologists, neuroscientists, and geneticists have developed a very different perspective. They now believe that the skill we term « intelligence » is not in the least fixed, but is actually remarkably variable. « It is now clear that intelligence is highly modifiable by the environment, » says Richard Nisbett, a psychologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
As a result, researchers have in recent years scaled back their estimates of the influence genetics plays in intelligence differences. The previous figure of 80 percent is outdated. Nisbett says that if you take social differences into account, you would find « 50 percent to be the maximum contribution of genetics. » That leaves an unexpectedly large proportion of a child’s intelligence for parents, teachers and educators to shape.
The findings will undoubtedly please those parents who already send their children to good schools, drive them to violin lessons in the afternoon, and then drag them around museums at the weekend. « So you haven’t wasted your time, money and patience on your children after all, » Nisbett says.
Time and again researchers have found that a child’s genes have far less of an effect on its brain than its surroundings — and the social environment is only one of the factors in this. Scientists in Boston, for instance, have found that children who live near roads and intersections and are thus exposed to higher levels of exhaust fumes have three IQ points fewer on average than children of the same age living in areas with cleaner air. That’s simply because microscopic dust and pollutants can reach the brain and then adversely effect the nerve cells’ ability to function properly.
In a similar way to those exposed to pollutants, children also suffer as a result of mental pressure, misery, worry and neglect. Chronic stress alters the way neurotransmitters work, inhibits the formation of new nerve cells and causes the hippocampus to shrivel.
That can lead to identifiable differences, as researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have shown. They found that stressed children from poor families performed up to 10 percent worse at memory tests than well looked-after children from middle-class homes.
IQ Increases with Each Year Spent in School
By contrast, IQ increases with every year a child spends at school. During World War II, some children in Holland started school late because of the Nazi occupation — with momentous consequences. « The average IQ for these children was seven points lower than for children who came of school age after the siege, » Nisbett says.
Unequal educational opportunities were and still remain particularly prevalent in the United States. American society denied black slaves an education, and refused them access to books. But the races remained divided even after the abolition of slavery in 1865. For a long time, dark-skinned children attended special schools that had terrible facilities. So it’s hardly surprising that they were behind when they were finally granted access to the public schools that were previously the sole preserve of white children.
White academics in the US repeatedly tried to claim that the resulting differences in performance were genetically determined. In the 1960s, psychologist Arthur Jensen from the University of California at Berkeley wondered why so many underachieving pupils were dark-skinned. How could anyone deny that their low intelligence was a feature of their ethnicity, Jensen argued. He therefore concluded that there was no point in trying to encourage children from socially disadvantaged groups at an early age.
The controversial book « The Bell Curve » was published in 1994. Its authors, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, warned against giving ethnic minorities easier access to universities.
An Unplanned Experiment in Germany
This is the line of reasoning that German central banker Thilo Sarrazin recently adopted when he provocatively suggested that the children of Turkish immigrants were genetically less well disposed than German children.
In spite of Sarrazin’s claims, an unplanned experiment that took place in Germany proved long ago that skin color had no influence on intelligence. After World War II, many American servicemen fathered children with German women. These bi-national offspring were dubbed » occupation babies ». Some of them had light-skinned American dads, others dark-skinned ones. In contrast to the US, this had no influence over their performance at school.
In 1961 Klaus Eyferth at the Hamburg University Institute of Psychology saw this as a unique opportunity to uncover the « developmental characteristics of (biracial) children » by comparing them with « white occupation babies. » Eyferth gave intelligence tests to 264 children and adolescents, 181 of them with dark skin, 83 with light skin. The children with a white father had an average IQ of 97, those with a black father 96.5, values statistically so close to one another to disprove the notion of « developmental characteristics. »
Hundreds of Thousands of Genes Play Role in Cognitive Skills
Modern genetic research has also now shown that there is no such thing as a biological source of cleverness consisting of one or a few « intelligence genes. » Apparently there are hundreds — if not thousands — of genes that play a role in determining our cognitive skills.
A person’s ability to make use of his or her genetic potential can indeed be influenced, especially if the person is assisted and permits others to help. Education researcher Anders Ericsson has also shown that master musicians, for example, aren’t born that way. Studying violinists in Berlin he found that none who had practiced for fewer than 10,000 hours ever became virtuosi. By contrast, nearly all those who had practiced for more than 10,000 hours by the age of 20 went on to become principal violinists.
The analogy doesn’t only hold for musicians. The notions of « chess genius » or « math genius » are likewise mere metaphors that don’t have any biological basis whatsoever.
True, time and again it has been observed that children in several Asian countries are far better at calculating than their peers in the West. But that has nothing to do with genetics — and everything to do with attitudes. In one study, students from Japan and Canada were given mathematical tasks. No matter how well they actually did, the researchers told one group of subjects they had done excellently. The others were informed they had flunked completely. The scientists then gave the subjects another set of tasks, and said they could take as long as they wanted.
The reactions by the students showed remarkable cultural differences. The Canadians were apparently motivated by success. Those who had been told they had done well in the first test spent significantly longer doing the second task than fellow Canadians who were given to believe they had done terribly the first time round. The Japanese subjects behaved quite differently. Those who had been given a bad grade in the first test worked longer and more diligently than those who had been praised. It therefore seems that a sense of failure was motivating for them.
Cognitive Skills a Reflection of Environment
Numbers aren’t the only thing you can teach through repeated practice. The same is true for words. A person’s vocabulary is an expression of how much their parents and significant others spoke to them as a child. According to studies conducted in the US, the average child has heard about 30 million words by the age of three. The figure for disadvantaged children is only 20 million. This then affects their active vocabulary. The average middle-class three-year-old can use 1,100 words, whereas children from poorer families only have about 525 at their disposal.
The new findings by the intelligence researchers all point in the same direction: Our cognitive skills are a reflection of our environment. « The low IQs expected for children born to lower-class parents can be greatly increased if their environment is sufficiently rich cognitively, » says psychologist Nisbett.
The practical possibilities have been explored by psychologists Sharon Landesman Ramey and Craig Ramey from Georgetown University in Washington, DC. The Rameys used as their subjects the children of extremely poor and poorly educated parents. In one project children spent their days at a special day-care center in which there was one teacher for each child and where the young charges were given special encouragement from the age of six weeks.
After three years, these children were compared to a control group. Lo and behold, the average IQ of the boys and girls was a staggering 13 points higher than that of similar children who had not been given special attention.
Translated from the German by Jan Liebelt
Voir aussi:
The Loneliness of Being White
Bruce Schoenfeld
The New York Times
May 14, 1995
VINNY DEL NEGRO AND TWO OF HIS San Antonio Spurs teammates went slouching into a tony clothing store during a recent road trip. In their sweats and T-shirts, they didn’t look especially promising as customers, just tall. Del Negro, the only white man of the three, was helped first. But when another customer asked one of the blacks for an autograph, the dynamic changed.
« As soon as the store realized that these two black guys were basketball players, they had five clerks waiting on them hand and foot, » Del Negro says. « Nobody ever thinks that I’m a player too — that a white guy could be playing professional basketball. »
A white player’s life in the National Basketball Association is a reverse-image experience all but unique in American culture. Although fewer than 13 percent of United States citizens are African-American, about 80 percent of the N.B.A.’s players are. Most of the stars are black, while the whites are usually the lesser-knowns, often the players at the end of the bench. There are exceptions, to be sure, including Utah’s John Stockton, Cleveland’s Mark Price and Minnesota’s Christian Laettner, but during the past two decades, most of the league’s best players — and biggest draws — have been black.
Of the 357 players on N.B.A. rosters as of the beginning of March, 290 were African-Americans, including several of mixed descent. Despite the recent infusion into the league of European-born white players like Chicago’s Toni Kukoc and Seattle’s Detlef Schrempf, only 7 of the 27 N.B.A. teams this season had a white player ranking among its top three in minutes played. Every one of the league’s 20 leading scorers was black, and all but 2 of its 20 leading rebounders. Not one N.B.A. team has as many whites as blacks. « This is a sport that requires running, jumping, quickness, strength and stamina, » says Laettner. « And for whatever reason, there are more blacks than whites able to do that. »
Offering an opinion on such racial incongruities often means asking for trouble, a lesson learned by Al Campanis, the former baseball executive; Jimmy (the Greek) Snyder, the former sports commentator, and the authors of « The Bell Curve. » But whatever its cause, the N.B.A.’s black-white ratio has had the intriguing effect of casting whites into minority roles.
« I tell white guys they’re living in Black America, » says San Antonio’s Glenn (Doc) Rivers, « just like we’re living in White America the rest of the time. »
THE N.B.A. DOESN’T WANT YOU TO think or read about its racial issues. While interviewing more than three dozen N.B.A. players for this article — slightly more than half of whom are white — I encountered several who had been cautioned by their team officials against speaking too freely on the subject of race relations within the N.B.A. One league official, a vice president with almost two decades’ experience, called me at home to dissuade me from writing the article. « This is scurrilous — the N.B.A. is colorblind, » he said. « I just don’t see what you’re getting at. »
But the players did. Living and working as a white man in the N.B.A. is a racial experience that few other whites will ever encounter, and nearly all of them realize that. « It’s not like someone saying, ‘My roommate in college was black and he was a great guy,’ » says Matt Geiger, a center for the Miami Heat. « I hate when people say that. On road trips, I won’t talk to a white person for five days, no real conversation. I’m not saying that’s bad or that’s good; that’s just my life — but it’s very different than someone saying, ‘I understand because I have a black friend.’ You don’t understand. I’ll come off a road trip and I’ll go into a meeting for some of the real-estate ventures I do and there’ll be all whites there. And it will seem so weird to me. I’ll be like: ‘Loosen up! What’s wrong with you people?’ «
Geiger, a 7-footer with a shaved head and a goatee, is a millionaire’s son who had little contact with blacks until he started playing basketball. He believes he has been profoundly changed by his immersion in black culture — in the way he talks, the clothes he wears, the music he listens to. « I have a real good relationship with a lot of the black players on my team because I think they realize I have an understanding of what it means to be black, » he says. « If I was working at I.B.M., I might not have this understanding. »
Over time, I learned to group the N.B.A.’s whites into two distinct camps: those who freely adopt elements of black culture, like Geiger, and those who don’t. Several black players, including Billy Owens, a teammate of Geiger’s, offered specific examples of other white players who « act black, » including Laettner, Golden State’s Chris Mullin and Washington’s Rex Chapman, and some of those who don’t, like Stockton and Price. The separation seemed neatly drawn; not one name came up on both lists.
Laettner, although he grew up in a largely white suburb of Buffalo and went to Duke University, can’t see how he could have turned out any other way. « Whoever you hang around with for most of your life, that’s who you become like, » he says. « And I’ve been playing basketball for most of my life. »
This season, Laettner was one of two white players on the Minnesota Timberwolves’ 12-man active roster, which is about average. The Chicago Bulls had six whites under contract, including one each from Croatia, Canada and Australia. Many black players believe that a team with few white players will make an extra effort to acquire one or more as reserves, if only to decorate the end of the bench. « If you win, it doesn’t matter what color the players are, » Rivers says. « If you’ve got a bad product — well then, white fans want to see their own. »
John Nash, the Washington Bullets’ general manager, who is white, doesn’t quite agree. « Don’t get me wrong, I think we identify with our own, » he says. « Italians like to see Italians, Irish like to see Irish, and that’s great. But the guy at the end of the bench isn’t going to sell any tickets. This business is about winning. Coaches and general managers lose their job if they don’t win, no matter what attendance is like. »
Accurately or not, many blacks believe that unofficial white quotas do exist, but shrug them off as an unavoidable extension of the outside world. « I don’t think 10 guys across the league would disagree, » says Brian Williams, a center-forward on the Denver Nuggets with a mixed heritage who considers himself black. « If you’re fighting for one of those last few spots, it definitely becomes an issue. »
Pete Chilcutt is one of the Houston Rockets’ two white players. « A lot of people look at us as tokens, » he admits. « They think there are one or two whites on the team because there has to be or there’d be an uproar. I feel white players don’t get the respect we deserve. There are only 300-something players in the N.B.A. That doesn’t leave room for tokens. »
The Spurs’ Del Negro sees what he calls « almost a reversed role » for whites. « If there are nine white guys and one black guy at a corporation, the black guy has to perform so people know he deserves to be there, » he says. « In the N.B.A., if there are nine black guys and one white guy, the white guy has to prove it. »
Some whites use the whispers of tokenism as self-motivation. On the court, Geiger throws himself at loose balls, emitting screams and grunts, and generally acts like a man possessed, helping transcend a stereotype he often hears around the league: that whites, because they don’t need basketball success as much as many blacks do, aren’t willing to work as hard. « Just because you come from an upper-class white background and have everything doesn’t mean you aren’t willing to sacrifice, » Geiger says. « If I didn’t really bust my tail, none of these guys would respect me. Like Harold tells me all the time » — referring to his teammate Harold Miner — » ‘Hey, man, you’re taking a spot away from a guy who would kill to be here, a black guy.’ «
The prevailing stereotype within the N.B.A. holds that a black player invariably comes from a lower socioeconomic rung than a white. There are obviously plenty of exceptions; but after an informal canvass on the topic, I realized that even if a white player came from the poorest background imaginable, it wouldn’t much matter. « If you’re white, I don’t care who you are, » one white player told me, lowering his voice in the corner of a locker room. « They’ll go right at you until you show them they can’t. »
PAT RILEY IS LEANING AGAINST ONE of the whitewashed cinder-block walls that seem to hold up every arena in the N.B.A. His New York Knicks have just come from behind to beat the Nuggets in Denver, and Riley, resplendent in a bright white shirt and a soft silk tie, is reliving the comeback for the reporters clustered around him.
On the other side of the wall, in the Knicks’ locker room, Riley’s players slump in various stages of exhaustion. Patrick Ewing, Hubert Davis and Charles Oakley all have bags of ice bandaged to their knees. Greg Anthony sits silently in front of his locker. Anthony Bonner and John Starks lean like bookends in opposite corners. All of them are black.
It’s a common N.B.A. scene: a team of black athletes coached by a white man. (The players, however, both black and white, are well remunerated: the average player salary last season was $1.6 million, while a head coach with a new contract might make just over $1 million.) At the beginning of this season, only 4 of the league’s 27 head coaches were black; by the end of the season, there were 7 black coaches — still a rather slim number considering that more than half of the league’s coaches are former N.B.A. players.
« It’s different playing for a black coach than a white coach, » says New York’s Derek Harper. « Especially with a black player playing for a black coach. » He cites the case of his teammate Ewing, who, while playing college basketball at Georgetown, developed a paternal relationship with his black coach, John Thompson. Harper, meanwhile, playing for a white coach, Lou Henson, at the University of Illinois, never felt comfortable carrying a closeness beyond the locker room.
There is certainly a large pool of potential black N.B.A. coaches, for the league has been integrated since 1950, and integration could easily have happened earlier: blacks had been playing on predominantly white college teams since 1920. One theory for the lag, cited by Arthur Ashe in his book « A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete, » has Abe Saperstein, owner of the hugely popular and profitable Harlem Globetrotters, threatening to hold his team out of arenas owned by any franchises that signed blacks. This would « ensure that the Globetrotters always had quality black players, » Ashe wrote, and retain the novelty of Saperstein’s all-black touring team.
The Globetrotters, founded in 1927, were arguably the most famous basketball team in the country. And they were no mere comedy act. Loaded with the best black talent, they filled arenas across the country throughout the 1930’s and 40’s. On occasion, they played N.B.A. teams, beating George Mikan and the Minneapolis Lakers during the Lakers’ championship 1948-49 season. But after the N.B.A.’s integration, having seen the direction in which the sport was heading, Saperstein shifted the Globetrotters’ emphasis from competition to entertainment.
By 1959, every N.B.A. franchise had signed at least one black player. A decade later, there were roughly equal numbers of black and white players. By the mid-1970’s, blacks had become a majority. According to Ashe, this growing imbalance created problems for the league. « In the early 1980’s, the black domination of the N.B.A. was cause for serious concern among the owners and league officials, » he wrote. « In spite of the natural talent displayed by black players, many continued to feel black player presence and dominance of the sport was the root cause of declining audience attendance. »
But attendance wasn’t declining everywhere. In 1979, the Boston Celtics signed Larry Bird, who would reign as the N.B.A.’s best white player until he retired in 1992; almost immediately, the team began selling out the Boston Garden. This was in sharp contrast to a previous Celtics era, when the dynamic black center Bill Russell had led the team to 11 championships but often failed to fill the Garden even for playoff games.
During the 1980’s, fielding the whitest team in basketball, the Celtics won three championships and sold out every home game. Of the 46 players who wore Celtic uniforms during the decade, 22 were white, including Bird, Kevin McHale, Danny Ainge and Bill Walton. At one point, 10 of 14 Celtics, including those on the injured-reserve list, were white; that team, playing for a black coach, K. C. Jones, breezed to the 1986 N.B.A. title.
The Celtics’ whiteness hardly went unnoticed. Many blacks around basketball, and around Boston, considered the Celtics to be a racist franchise that pandered to a largely racist community. (The Boston Red Sox had long endured similar criticism.)
« We were winning championships — that’s what I’d say to that theory, » says McHale, now the assistant general manager of the Minnesota Timberwolves. « It didn’t make any difference if we were white or black. »
Still, Dennis Rodman and Isiah Thomas, black players then with the Detroit Pistons, went so far as to claim that if Bird had been black, he would have been considered merely another talented player, not the N.B.A. legend and folk hero he had become.
« The rest of the world is ignorant, and through ignorance comes stereotypes, » says McHale, recalling a Celtics team so relaxed about race that they held practice games of whites against blacks. « I was lucky enough to play with one of the best players who ever lived — Larry Bird. When Dennis Rodman said he’d be just an average player if he was black, I thought, ‘I guard him every day in practice; he’d kick your butt if he was black or any other color.’ That was just idiotic. »
For all Bird’s athletic ability, even white fans seem to remember him more for his passing, his nearly flat-footed outside shots and his intelligent play. Similarly, Danny Ainge, now with the Phoenix Suns, rarely receives mention as one of the league’s most athletic players even though he played third base for the Toronto Blue Jays and has good jumping skills and extraordinary hand-eye coordination. « Sure, the white guys are the free-throw shooters and the three-point shooters, » Ainge says with a tinge of bitterness. « The black guys, they’re the jumpers and dunkers, the better athletes. It’s a stereotype that’s unfortunate for both sides. I don’t think I’ve gotten credit as an athlete. And at the same time, there’s the perception that a Clyde Drexler or a Michael Jordan is so gifted that the game comes easy to him and that’s not true, either. »
Ainge’s teammate Danny Schayes, who is also white, asks: « When is the last time you saw an ‘N.B.A. Is Fantastic’ video with some white guy dunking on somebody? I was always perceived as the slow white guy even though I’ve never been that. It would have been interesting to see how it would have been if I had been black. They probably would have said, ‘Wow, you’re a smart player for a black guy.’ «
Still, about half the white players I interviewed had little objection to the racial stereotypes. « You have to be a realist, » says Scott Brooks, a white guard on the Dallas Mavericks. « It’s true in most cases. White people can’t jump as high. That’s a fact. And it’s a fact that white people don’t have much rhythm. We are stiff. »
Pete Chilcutt, too, is willing to make some concessions. « I’m exactly the kind of player that white players are stereotyped after, » he says. « That’s my game. I’m a smart player. I think I’m athletic, but I’m not nearly as athletic as some of the guys who can play the game. I can dunk, but I don’t dunk like some of these guys do. There aren’t many white guys who can jump the way they can. »
I called the Rockets looking for a statistic that might illustrate Chilcutt’s style and I found one: as of the beginning of March, the 6-foot-11 forward had played 780 minutes of N.B.A. basketball this season and recorded a grand total of nine dunks.
CHILCUTT, PAGING THROUGH OMNI magazine, is sitting on the Houston Rockets’ team bus as it heads toward Reunion Arena in Dallas. One seat ahead, gazing out a window, is Hakeem Olajuwon, who led Houston to a championship last year and won the league’s Most Valuable Player award. Across the aisle from Olajuwon, holding a book in his lap, sits Clyde Drexler. Toward the back of the bus, a group of black players, including Mario Elie, Sam Cassell, Vernon Maxwell and Kenny Smith, is getting out pregame jitters with sharp laughter.
At the moment, Chilcutt is the only active white player on the Houston roster. There are white coaches, a white trainer, a white media relations director and a white reporter on the bus, but no white peers. It is a situation, he says, that he has grown accustomed to and hardly notices anymore, though this year he spent much of his time on the road with two white teammates, Scott Brooks (who was recently traded) and Zan Tabak (who was on the injured list for several weeks). « We don’t dislike the black music or the life style, we just have a different kind of life style, » Chilcutt said. « We get along great with everybody on the team, but we just don’t go out and do the things they do. »
From the court to the bus to the locker room, black culture sets the tone in the N.B.A. « Throughout my career, whenever there’s been public music in the locker room or from a boom box, it has always been black music, » says Schayes. « I remember coming into the league and it taking me a while, hanging out around a lot of black players, even to understand what they were saying. They’re talking fast, using slang and nicknames. There’s an awkward time when you’re trying to get accepted, learn what they’re about, let them know what you’re about. »
Schayes adjusted, as every white player must who wants to stay in the league. « I’ve seen players whose careers have died because they don’t like blacks, » he says. « They had no chance, nor should they have a chance. Not only were they frozen out, but vilified, to the point where even the white guys didn’t want to be around them. »
Life inside the bubble of the N.B.A., several black players told me, is a refreshing reprieve from, as Doc Rivers puts it, White America. But the league is hardly perfect. While black coaches are rare, there are also few black front-office executives and not a single team has black majority ownership.
« This is only a black league from the players’ point of view, » says the Nuggets’ Brian Williams. « What you have in the N.B.A. is the same slice of broad America that you have in business — let’s say 15 percent, approximately, of coaches and front-office personnel are black. Now, since 15 percent of America is black, there’s nothing really wrong with that, right? Except that 15 percent of the players aren’t black — they’re white. »
AS THE ROCKETS TAKE THE COURT against the Mavericks, two white fans lean over the railing to speak to Olajuwon, the affable Nigerian-born center. Then Maxwell emerges from the tunnel. It is his first game since a 10-game suspension for hitting a fan and he’s greeted by boisterous shouts both for and against him. Drexler, on his way to the court, stops for a brief conversation with a fan in the second row. For most Rockets fans, black and white, these three players are the Rockets, along with Cassell, Smith and Robert Horry.
Pete Chilcutt steps to the floor unnoticed. Like the majority of the N.B.A.’s white players, he’s part of the supporting cast. He’ll never be an Olajuwon or a Jordan, pulling fans from their homes on a winter night. He has worked his way to the pinnacle of his profession, but he goes largely unappreciated even by the white stockbrokers who invariably talk sports after an hour of clumsy 5-on-5 at the Y. Here in Reunion Arena, as Chilcutt picks a ball off a metal rack and holds it in his hands for a moment to get its feel, he is nothing so much as anonymous. Off by himself in a corner, he begins to shoot.
Let’s first say that it’s not a big deal that there has only been two Caucasian players in the last 20 years, but it might be surprising to some as it was to me. Somewhat of an odd and potentially provocative factoid, I know, but there it is.
What got me researching past rosters was when I recently looked over the 2016 roster representing the United States in Rio and noticed that the team didn’t include one Caucasian player (Klay Thompson is mixed African-American and Caucasian).
After seeing this, I thought to myself “Was this the first time that the US Men’s Olympic Basketball Team didn’t have a white player?” Nothing more than curious, I promise you.
Again, keep in mind that I follow Olympic basketball pretty closely and have since the 1992 Dream Team suited up and kicked the world’s collective behinds. It turns out that this composition wasn’t so uncommon, just bad memory on my part. Including the 1996 Games in Atlanta, only two Caucasian players have suited up over the six Olympics from 1996-2016 with the 2000 Olympic basketball team being the first without at least one white player.
It was bound to happen, as the National Basketball Association is predominantly African American according to the 2015 Racial and Gender Report Card for the NBA. The NBA in 2015 was composed of 74.4 percent black players, 23.3 percent white players, 1.8 percent Latino players, and 0.2 percent Asian players. These were self-reported numbers. With nearly three quarters of the league being Black players, the odds are higher that a team (All-Star, Olympic, First Team All-NBA) would be comprised of mostly or all Black players.
(Any guess who the 0.2 percent Asian player was?)
So looking at the data, the majority of the USA Olympic team has been comprised of African-American players, 70 of the 72 roster spots in Atlanta (1996), 2000 (Sydney), Athens (2004), Beijing (2008) London (2012) and Rio De Janiero (2016) self-identified as African American or mixed race.
Those two Caucasian players? John Stockton suited up again after the 1992 Games for the 1996 Atlanta games and Kevin Love represented the United States in 2012.